Recently, George Clooney and a bunch of other wealthy actors offered to pony up tens of millions of their dollars to help other, less-wealthy actors afford things like medical care, rent, and food while the Screen Actors Guild renegotiates its contract.
Note what these wealthy actors didn’t do. They didn’t say: We’re going to give money to everyone who needs it, just to our fellow actors.
Also, they didn’t say: We’re going to try to use politics to force other people to give money to these actors. We’ll keep this within the acting community.
Which is to say, although it’s probably unintentional, George and his friends are illustrating a point I made a while ago: That if the Democratic Party really wants to have single-payer healthcare, or subsidized schools that serve as parental surrogates, or any of its other progressive desires, it could do that right now.
All it has to do is say: The wealthier Democrats will pay the costs of _________ for the less-wealthy Democrats, leaving everyone else out of it:
https://granitegrok.com/blog/2019/03/the-single-payer-party
The party doesn’t have to wait for the government to act or work to wrest control of government so party members can get what they want (or what party leadership tells them they should want).
All the party needs to understand is that to help one group of people — actors, Democrats, parents of gender-confused children, or anyone else — you don’t need to get everyone in on the act. Especially people who abhor what you’re trying to do, and will fight you every step of the way.
(Similarly, the other major party needs to understand that to control the moral behavior of its members, it can do that without policing the behavior of everyone else.)
Why is this such a difficult thing for people to understand? I mean, even George Clooney gets it.